Page 94

That's what I want on the record first, before any of the rest, because it is the only part of Monday I would keep. The rest was a nightmare.

The room was full of that early light that comes off the hills before the sun properly clears them, grey going gold. No caterers. No vans, and no Ascendant. Nothing out there but a hundred and forty chairs' worth of flattened grass, and a man asleep next to me with his mouth open.

Gregory sleeps the way he does everything, which is to say he takes up more room than he is entitled to. He had one arm under my neck and the other flung out across the bed. The sheet was somewhere around his knees.

I lay there and looked at him for a long time. And then I did something I had not done in two years, which was let myself think about a future with Gregory Normand without immediately building a case against it.

I thought about the fact that he snores slightly, but only in the first hour, and how completely I had forgotten that and how instantly it came back.

I thought about my apartment. He would hate the sofa in the living room and would say so inside a day.

I thought about the fact that he has never once in his life put a lid back on anything.

I thought about how he would be shooting on location by October, and how it wouldn't matter now, because I am thirty-eight years old and I have some idea what I can survive. Gregory leaving for a location shoot and coming home is not, in itself, a catastrophe. If it became the whole architecture of a life again — him always choosing the work, every time — I would have a problem with that.

I thought — and this is the part I go back to — that I could ask him to stay.

Not the way I asked him for things before, which was never. I mean out loud, with words, in a sentence, the way one person asks another. Don't go on location. Produce something here. Something small. One room, even.

I was making a plan. Lying in that bed, on the Monday after my disastrous wedding, I was constructing something for the first time in two years that wasn't a defense.

Gregory woke up while I was doing it.

"You're staring," he said, without opening his eyes.

"I am."

"How long?"

"A while."

"That's alarming."

He opened his eyes then. And here's what I want down, in as few words as I can manage, because I have never been able to describe it to anybody without sounding like a fool.

That man wakes up looking at me exactly the way he looked at me across a producer's rented living room in Los Feliz eleven years ago, when I was a junior associate somebody had brought along to make up the numbers, and he had absolutely no business talking to me.

Eleven years. Six of them married, two of them gone, and he still opens his eyes like that.

"Come here," I said.

"I'm already here." He laid his hand over mine.

"Gregory."

So he came here.

We lay there wrapped in silence with the rest of the world falling away, and when his mouth found mine it was slow, unhurried, the kind of kiss you only get when there's nowhere either of you has to be. His hand came up along my jaw and stayed there. He laughed against my mouth halfway through and I felt it go all the way down my spine.

"Blaine."

"Mm."

"I want to say something and I'd like you not to be a lawyer about it."

"I make no promises."

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I want you to know that whatever happens, I'm not—"